This volume collects four sharp philosophical essays by Ilan Stavans on the acquisition of knowledge in multi-ethnic environments, the role that dictionaries play in the preservation of memory, the function of libraries in the electronic age, and the uses of censorship. In the second part of the volume, Veronica Albin engages Stavans in a series of four conversations in which he expounds on the arguments he developed in the essays.

This volume collects four sharp philosophical essays by Ilan Stavans on the acquisition of knowledge in multi-ethnic environments, the role that dictionaries play in the preservation of memory, the function of libraries in the electronic age, and the uses of censorship. In the second part of the volume, Veronica Albin engages Stavans in a series of four conversations in which he expounds on the arguments he developed in the essays.

Fascinated by the idea of Western civilization as being a sequence of numerous misinterpretations and misrepresentations, these 19 essays cover a broad range of topics with the unifying theme being the crossroads where politics and the imagination meet. An essay on linguistics and culture discusses the shaping of Latin America’s collective identity; Peru’s modern history is approached as a bloody battle between enlightenment and darkness; and in critiques of Octavio Paz and Gabriel García Márquez, Ilan Stavans reflects on the dichotomy between pen and sword in the Hispanic world. In Letter to a German Friend, Stavans returns to his fate as a Jew in the Southern Hemisphere, and in The First Book, he connects his passion for literature to his initiation into Jewishness. Finally, in a meditation on Columbus’s afterlife, he reflects on the many ways in which we reinvent ourselves in order to make sense of the chaotic world that surrounds us.

Imagining Columbus: The Literary Voyage is Ilan Stavans’s contribution to the literature on Columbus. “My purpose,” says Stavans, “is to revisit, to investigate, to play with the asymmetrical geometries of the admiral’s literary adventures in the human imagination.” Arguing that writers have portrayed Columbus in three ways—as prophet or messiah, as ambitious gold-seeker, and as a conventional, rather unremarkable man—Stavans examines numerous poems, novels, short stories, dramas, and other works on Columbus in this provocative book.